Morocco leaves Qatar dissatisfied however crammed with satisfaction at having written its names into the historical past books by turning into the primary African crew to succeed in the World Cup semi-finals, their coach Walid Regragui mentioned.
Morocco was crushed 2-0 by France on Wednesday and can go right into a playoff for third place with Croatia whereas the French will face Argentina within the remaining.
“We realise that we made a great achievement already,” Regragui instructed reporters. “We know that the media, social media, and on TV, we saw the pictures, and we saw that everyone was proud of us in our country.
“We’re disappointed for the Moroccan people tonight, we wanted to keep the dream alive. But we’re pleased with what we’ve achieved. We felt that we could have even gone even further but these small details help real champions, which we saw tonight, of course.”
Regragui instructed his gamers he was pleased with them.
“His Majesty was also proud, the Moroccan people were proud,” he mentioned. “I think the world as a whole is proud of this Moroccan team because we show great desire. We work hard, and we played honest, hard-working football.
“I think we’ve given a good image of Morocco and a good image of African football and that was also important for us, because we were representing our country and our continent.”
Morocco, who got here into the match with the perfect defensive document within the event, conceded from France’s first critical assault 5 minutes into the sport.
“Today, if I have regrets, it’s the start of the game,” Regragui added. “We started quite poorly and we conceded a goal very quickly and that made the difference.
“They allowed us to have quite a lot of possession, but we made too many mistakes to cause them problems.”
Regragui thought his crew improved within the second half.
“We created a lot of opportunities, but unfortunately we weren’t clinical in the last third,” he mentioned.
“We tried everything to get a goal but congratulations to France. We’re going to support them now.”
Morocco misplaced first-choice centre again Nayef Aguerd within the warm-up after a recurrence of a hamstring harm and their captain Romain Saiss left the pitch injured within the first half.
“In spite of all of the injuries that we had, the tiredness, we pulled out all the stops and we gave everything,” Regragui mentioned.
He was happy that his crew had brought on France issues.
“But I think physically, we came up short tonight. We had too many players who were 60% or 70%, and have been for a few games now,” Regragui mentioned.
“My players gave everything and they’ve gone as far as they could. I really wanted to rewrite the history books, but you can’t win a World Cup with miracles, you need to do it through hard work. And that’s what we’re going to do.”
